Originally post by Julia
Hello again, Marquis. Thank you so much for yet another very informative post.
What he will have to work with is called "Adobe Premiere Pro." He has only the software. No card selected as yet. I was hoping my thought about a used Matrox G450 might combine with the Adobe software to do a really fine job of producing near-professional quality. I don't know enough about graphics cards or video editing, though. We did produce a really neat DVD at Christmas (based on a song I wrote and the children at the school where I work), but what a learning curve that was! It was accomplished on an HP (thus my sudden desire to learn to build my OWN computers), but really was a stressful adventure. The whole encoding thing presented numerous issues, and the hours rolled into days as we fought with the rendering and the encoding in an attempt to not lose all of the audio quality in the process. What a nightmare.
I'm the musician/composer/songwriter. My best friend is a photographer and shot the photos and digital video for us. She's got a great eye...but even combined, none of us knows much about the whole concept of video editing and DVD creation. So...we're learning.
I want to build my system at the end of this week (Newegg willing), and get my feet wet as it were, and then help build the video editing workstation. My friend and I have done a lot of reading about the 64-bit chips, and the 3200+ seems to be a great possibility, but what a price! $400+ for just a processor. If it would be worth the investment, though, I'd toss a credit card at it.
So...what is your take on the 64-bit chip, Marquis? I realize that software has yet to catch up with the chip.
Do you think there's another motherboard out there (and perhaps an Athlon XP 3200+, just the regular 32-bit chip?) which would be better or as good?
I realized that I wrote earlier about my idea of my friend using the DDR400 (PC3200) in dual channel mode with the soon-to-be (maybe) 64-bit system, but I'm not yet certain the motherboard we selected (thanks again to Tom's Hardware articles and information) even runs dual channel with the Athlon 64 3200+.
(The motherboard is the MSI K8T Neo.)
And thanks, Marquis, for your willingness to teach. What a wonderful gift.
You've been building computers since you were 5??????? Wow.
No wonder you know so much!
Thanks for sharing a bit of it with me.
Julia
The choice of Premiere Pro (herein simply referred to as "Premiere" since I presume he won't want to downgrade to an older version
) is a good one, and will certainly never be holding your friend back from producing pro-quality video projects. I've used it with much success personally, in addition to Adobe's other DCC apps (After Effects, Encore, Illustrator, PhotoShop).
This is also good to know, as there is some hardware that is particularly well suited to Premiere use. For one, Adobe has spent a good deal of time optimizing for SSE2. I would therefore definitely recommend your friend purchase a Pentium4-based system. While the Opteron/Athlon64/AthlonFX line supports this instruction set, it does not do so as well as a P4 does. Premiere also has several HyperThreading optimizations that are likely to continue to improve over time (with patches).
Unfortunately, Adobe has not committed to optimizations for AMD's 64-bit chips. While they do have a history of supporting enhanced instruction sets in order to improve application performance (their latest PhotoShop graphics engine for Apple's G5 nearly doubles performance), it is a bit of a gamble; and not one that I would risk my money on.
Besides, for $20 cheaper than an Athlon64 3200+ (it's actually just about $300 at NewEgg right now), you can get a P4 3.0C that will give amazing performance in Premiere.
There are other options, though, if price is a significant factor (and trust me, I understand; $300 just for the CPU is hard to swallow). Any of the P4 "C" chips (2.4C, 2.6C, 2.8C) will give great performance in Premiere. Currently the 2.6C gives the best price/performance ratio at $169. Of course, for even less money you could essentially duplicate the system that you're building. I would not say that such a system will perform poorly in Premiere, as that is not the case. But it won't be quite what a P4 system would be. As always, it's all about money. The old car racer's saying applies very well to computers: "Speed costs money. How fast do you want to go?"
Another thing to consider is that the Socket 754 platform that is currently used by the Athlon 64 line will be phased into AMD's "value" line and will be replaced in the mainstream and performance segments with the forthcoming Socket 939. This will limit potential future CPU upgrades on this platform should your friend choose to do so.
As for the DDR400 in dual channel mode, you are correct that the Athlon 64 does not support it. That is not to say two 512MB DDR400 DIMMs aren't a good choice, however (1GB DIMMs are prohibitively expensive). But there is no such thing as dual-channel on an Athlon 64 (but there is on the Opteron and AthlonFX).
Now, back to the analog input question. For good workflow with Premiere, it is essential to have native capture capabilities. There are a few options here. Canopus makes their ADVC1394, and is available at NewEgg for $226. It's a PCI card that includes Firewire and analog input. ADS makes an external analog to DV (Firewire) converter called the Pyro A/V Link
API-550. NewEgg doesn't carry ADS products, but Amazon has it for $160.88. This requires Firewire input on the motherboard or a Firewire PCI card installed. My personal preference would be the Canopus product as it is certified for use with Premiere. Plus, there can be headaches using an external Firewire device for audio/video input since some products just don't like certain IEEE1394 controllers (which may necessitate a Firewire PCI card anyway, negating the price benefits of the external box). Both products are well-respected on the whole.
Of course, there are a whole host of significantly more expensive options for pro-level (versus the aforementioned products' "semi-pro" status) work. If your friend is interested, I could detail several of them and their pros and cons.
Originally post by Julia
By the way...
If a motherboard has a front side bus of only 333mhz, then why does such a motherboard accept/use DDR400 RAM? Would that be solely for the purpose of overclocking, and only useful to a system that is overclocked?
The primary reason is that the board supports processors that use a 400MHz FSB (such as
the Athlon XP 3200+). It's also possible to run the memory bus asynchronously with the CPU FSB, though the extra bandwidth does not justify the increased latencies inherent with such a configuration. Only in the most extreme memory bandwidth bottlenecked applications where latency is a secondary performance factor (largely nonexistent outside of some obscure scientific applications) does this provide any real benefit.
Originally post by Julia
Okay, last post tonight, honest.
Marquis, check out this deal...1GB of DDR400 (PC3200) for only a few dollars more than I was going to pay for 1GB of DDR333(PC2700).
What do you think?
I wouldn't be too concerned with this, in particular because you don't intend to overclock. For your system, it won't really matter.
Originally post by Julia
It seems that every time I think I've found a great deal somewhere, there's a better one popping up elsewhere (sometimes the day after I buy!)
This is the rule of computers. The moment you actually spend your money on something, a better deal will be found.
